Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper argues that four games played daily in Indian households, chess, carrom, rummy, and Ludo (and its ancestor Pachisi), preserve a legible history of colonial contact and gendered exchange within their boards and pieces, even though none was designed as a deliberate instrument of ideology. Reading each game as a text, in the tradition of Edward Said's account of how Western contact reframes the East, Homi Bhabha's model of colonial hybridity, and Gayle Rubin's analysis of women as the medium rather than the party of kinship exchange, this paper traces how Chaturanga's plural, non-gendered form was narrowed into modern chess's binary contest and singular queen; how carrom's central, prized red disc occupies exactly the structural position Rubin's theory predicts for a feminized token of exchange; how rummy carries a borrowed, faintly disreputable colonial-era history despite a comparatively equal internal card hierarchy; and how Pachisi, on paper the least hierarchical game in this study, is remembered historically for the moments, at Akbar's Mughal court and in the Mahabharata's dice match, when its tokens became women themselves. Read together, these four case studies test Johan Huizinga's model of the
Author: Sulochana Simha.D
Institution: Bangalore University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7218535935